Technology

It's important to note that "doing well financially" isn't just revenue and user count, it's also expenditures. If Twitter has managed to cut costs by more than whatever its income has dropped by then that could well be a good outcome for it, I've heard it wasn't profitable when Musk took it over.

It's kind of ironic how big companies are frequently criticized for fixating on "endless growth" and "line goes up", and then when a company or organization sheds that it also looks bad.

They're bots

He kept the 70% he wanted, it'll be a propaganda engine and communications platform for the right wing.

I have a lot of friends that won’t quit because of sports updates and all the shitposts

This is in addition to the first year of losses, which are likely higher.

This should be human usage - the user survey was done by phone.

Any time something gets too big it gets bots. Lemmy will be the same. We will see instances getting defederated who cannot manage the spam.

Fuck Elon though

Mastodon has been great.

I was never active in terms of posting but I followed several news outlets, local government agencies, and a few friends. Shortly after Musk took over I saw nothing but right wing nutjobs and a lot of posts from Musk. I tried unfollowing but nothing worked so I quit logging in. I need to cancel my account but haven't taken the time.

Facebook does that for me too, alongside flat earthers, anti EV crap and the occasional funny picture. It's depressing.

It's such a stupid name! Everytime it's mentioned, it has to be prepend or suffixed with something so people actually understand the "X" context.

And more importantly - If you visit x.com, it redirects to twitter.com! So what's the fucking point of the rebrand?

Until he stops allowing deadnaming on his site, I'm going to deadname his site.

Xitter, but the X makes a ‘sh’ sound.

i heard there's good porn on there, probably why some decided to stick around

ran into this last night.

I hate twitter, but there was something I was trying to see and the only way to get the info was from a twitter post. Couldnt view the goddamn twitter post without creating an account and logging in.

My immediate thought was "This isnt important enough for this bullshit" and immediately gave up.

I'm convinced this login to view shit is to hide the explosion of right wing white supremacy/racism/etc posts and the bots echoing and amplifying it from people before they commit themselves to an account.

Yep, Saudi Arabia bought that service and the price, giving a man child a toy that it would probably ruin quickly, looked rather attractive.

X is one of his older websites, a financial platform that he created after his first startup was sold. Name comes from "X marks the spot" from old treasure maps, was to be the place for all transactions.

It struggled and didn't really get off the ground, but was able to merge with another platform called Confinity, run by Peter Thiel. The merged platforms then became PayPal, and made both guys rich as shit. Thiel eventually power played Musk and got him kicked out of the company, arguably for good reason, though Thiel is quite a piece of work, too.

The new X is Musk's attempt to make twitter more like his old site, and is why he was throwing around things like making it a peer to peer payment site, similar to WeChat / WePay or Venmo. How he plans to make tweets into bank transfers I've got no idea, esp. when losing 30 percent of users.

More on this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacharyfolk/2024/01/09/x-announces-peer-to-peer-payment-service-will-launch-in-2024/?sh=62ee775a75a8

An obsolete windowing system for UNIX like operating systems

It's his favorite letter or something. He'd wanted to name something X for a while. The closest he got before was SpaceX. Which I suppose now retroactively means SpaceTwitter.

Bots on bots on bots.

I’m sure a lot of the original population has dropped by a lot more than that, but in numbers they would have been replaced by an influx of fascists and bots.